The Late Orientalizing Bronze Workshops at Chiusi
Antonella Romualdi
It is now some time since the griffin protome, of Samian
production and previously attributed to the votive deposit of
Brolio in the Val di Chiana, was recognised as belonging in
reality (since at least 1777) to the Medici and Lorraine
collections. The opportunity to pay tribute to my friend and
maestra Sybille Haynes offers me the occasion to present a
small bronze in the Museo Archeologico, Florence; and to
discuss, with particular reference to Chiusi (Romualdi 1992,
95), a number of issues concerning bronze imports from Greece
and the products of the bronze workshops in Etruria in the Late
Orientalising period.
From the lists preserved in the Filze Archive in the Uffizi, it
is clear that three griffin protomes were found in 1863 in the
Brolio deposit and subsequently sent to the Reale Galleria. The
other two unprovenanced griffin protomes in the Florence
Museum collection, however, both already appeared in Luigi
Lanzi’s 1763 manuscript inventory of the bronzes in the Reale
Galleria, so it was proposed that a different small bronze be
attributed to the Brolio Deposit. The piece in question, which
has so far escaped the attention of scholars, seems to appear for
the first time in the 1871 ‘Register of ancient artefacts added to
the Etruscan Museum’.1 It is a solid-cast bronze protome,
10.0cm high, and bears the inventory number 808 (Fig. 1). The
following fanciful statement appears in the museum inventory:
‘badge in the shape of a small dog’s head with open mouth’.
There are traces of oxidised iron at the lower attachment,
where a nail, round in section, is preserved. The protome has a
perfunctorily modelled head and a short, slightly curved,
hooked beak.
The eyes, triangular in shape, are bulbous and outlined by
incision. The swelling brows are characterised by a long wavy
line which continues to the ears. The conical protuberance on
the forehead, on a moulded base, appears almost outsize in
relation to the head. The jaws are emphasised externally by
short irregular strokes; the internal details are incised. The fur
on the neck is rendered, not very naturalistically, by a kind of
incised triangular kerchief with long oblique hatching. The
neck, lacking both the usual thickening towards the base and
the scales, is decorated on the back by three inverted Vs, one
above the other, the upper two with ends curling inwards,
while the lowest set is only very lightly incised. The lower end
of the protome is extended into a vertical and a horizontal
element, fitted with a rivet that forms the ‘back’ of the griffin.
This particular form so far has only one parallel on the art
market and, like ours, is small (Art of the Ancient World, Royal
Athena Galleries, New York 1985, 52, no. 173). The original
function must have been to decorate a terminal on a piece of
furniture or similar wooden item. For a very general
comparison regarding the decorative function we can cite,
among other examples, the small wooden table from tomb
B/1971 Lippi in the Verucchio cemetery (von Eles 2007, 149–56,
figs 5–6). The nature of the fitting in fact seems to exclude the
possibility that the piece was re-used already in antiquity, or
that it belonged to a lebes or other vessel. Jantzen’s hypothesis
that no griffin protomes made in Etruria can be associated with
vessels was refuted by Herrmann’s attribution of three
examples found at Olympia to Etruscan manufacture; to these
were added the two protomes from the Brolio votive deposit in
the Val di Chiana (Jantzen 1955, 80; Herrmann 1981, 83–90).
The re-discovery of the little bronze in the Florence Museum
increases the currently exiguous number of extant Etruscan
protomes that can be associated with furniture, chariot fittings
Figure 1 Bronze griffin-head protome, Florence, Museo Archeologico, inv.808. Ht.10cm
Etruscan by Definition | 57
Romualdi
or fire-dogs (Haynes 1985, 254–5). What is especially striking
about the group is the variety in the physiognomical detail,
which distinguishes it iconographically and stylistically — and
thus (as already noted by Jantzen) impedes the attribution to
one or more workshops. The type with a forepart and very
stylized muzzle is represented by an example with a
quadrangular socket, now in the British Museum, and said to
be from Vulci; it is attributed by Haynes to a south Etruscan
workshop (Haynes 1985, 25, no. 25). Although they differ in the
more naturalistic treatment of the muzzle, two protomes in the
Louvre can also be assigned to this type (Jantzen 1955, pl. 59).
The recent discovery of the context of the griffin protomes
from Chiusi in the British Museum (Paolucci 2005, 102–3, fig. 8;
Paolucci 2007, 26–7), in a sense confirms the attribution to a
workshop in Chiusi proposed by Sybille Haynes (Haynes 1985,
102–3). Together with a horse-head protome, which also found
its way to London, the griffin protome was in fact discovered in
1846 by Mauro and Claudio Paolozzi during the excavation of a
tomb at Dolciano, which also yielded ‘pieces of tubing’ (now
interpreted as parts of tripods). The presence on both the
protomes of a socket, quadrangular in section, excludes the
possibility that they could originally have belonged to a tripod,
as proposed by some (Minetti 2000, 85; Paolucci 2005, 102–3;
contra Bruni 2002, 38), or – even less probably – to a lebes.
Although finials of this type are sometimes taken to indicate
fire-dogs in the scientific literature, the presence of nails with
round heads (for example in the British Museum examples),
clearly intended for attachment, suggests that they may rather
have been used as to decorate a wooden element in funerary
ritual —perhaps actually connected with the transportation
and deposition of the deceased. However, the lack of
contextual data, combined with the practical problems of
inspecting all the pieces, makes interpretation difficult: suffice
it to note that the complete absence of nails in the griffin
protome acquired in 1941 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York led to the suggestion that in this case the wooden
element was simply inserted into the bronze terminal (cf.
Jantzen 1955, 80, note 119; Haynes 1985, 255, no. 26).
The little protome in the Museo Archeologico, Florence,
now reunited (if our research into the inventories has led to the
right conclusion) with the votive deposit from Brolio in the Val
di Chiana, thus adds a new functional type to enrich the
picture of decorative finials for wooden furniture produced in
Etruscan bronze workshops.
For some time now, it has generally been thought that
between the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 6th
century the majority of the griffin protomes emerged from
bronze workshops operating at Chiusi. This hypothesis is
strengthened by the considerable number of ceramic imitations
securely attested at Chiusi (suggesting the circulation of Greek
models), and by the imports from east Greece at Trestina in the
upper Tiber valley (where the rôle of Chiusi does not seem to be
secondary) (cf. Martelli Cristofani 1978, 170–1; Cristofani 1996,
127ff; Camporeale 2000, 101–24; Haynes 2000, 129; Romualdi
in press, 53; for Trestina, see Macnamara in press, 85–106).
It remains to consider and further define the relationship
which must have existed between the output of bronze
workshops in southern and northern Etruria. For example, in
another typological sphere, the decoration of the Dutuit
chariot has recently been attributed to a Chiusine workshop:
58 | Etruscan by Definition
but it has also been proposed to recognize it in fact as the work
of south Etruscan (especially Veientine) craftsmen who had
transferred their operations to Chiusi (Maggiani 2007, 94–5; cf.
also Minetti 2004, 449). The question, still open, of models and
transmission constitutes one of the still partly-unsolved riddles
arising out of the intricate story of Etruscan bronze
craftsmanship between the end of the 7th and the beginning of
the 6th century bc.
Note
1
For the lists of the material from the votive deposit at Brolio, see
Romualdi 1981, pp. 56(D3), 58(D8), 59(D11); the two other griffin
protomes are now numbered 815 and 816 in the collections of the
Museo Archeologico, Florence. Luigi Lanzi’s inventory of the
bronzes is in the process of being published by Cristiana
Zaccagnino, with a preface by Luigi Beschi (Naples: La Stanza
delle Scritture, forthcoming).
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